Tag: work

A Thing or Two

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My father always knew the secret
name of everything—
stove bolt and wing nut,
set screw and rasp, ratchet
wrench, band saw, and ball—
peen hammer. He was my
tour guide and translator
through that foreign country
with its short-tempered natives
in their crewcuts and tattoos,
who suffered my incompetence
with gruffness and disgust.
Pay attention, he would say,
and you’ll learn a thing or two.

Now it’s forty years later,
and I’m packing up his tools
(If you know the proper
names of things you’re never
at a loss) tongue-tied, incompetent,
my hands and heart full
of doohickeys and widgets,
whatchamacallits, thingamabobs.
~Ronald Wallace “Hardware” from Time’s Fancy

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.”

So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also . . . 

Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums . . . 

And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon
Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.
~Seamus Heaney “A Call” from ‘Poems That Make Grown Men Cry’

Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down
By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
~Seamus Heaney from “Digging” from Death of a Naturalist

My father was a complex man. As I’ve aged, I understand better where my own complicated nature comes from.

As inscrutable as he could be, there were things I absolutely understood about him:

he was a man of action
– he never just sat, never took a nap, never wasted a day of his life without accomplishing something tangible.

he was a man of the soil
– he plowed and harrowed and sowed and fertilized and weeded and cut brush and harvested

he was a man of inventiveness
– he figured out a better way, he transformed tools and buildings, he started from scratch and built the impossible

he didn’t explain himself
– and never felt the need to.

Time keeps ticking on without him here, now 30 years since he took his last breath as the clock pendulum swung back and forth in his bedroom. He was taken too young for all the projects he still had in mind.

He handed off a few to me.
Some I have done.
Some still wait, I’m not sure why.

My regret is not understanding how much he needed to hear how loved he was. He seemed fine without it being said.

But he wasn’t fine. And neither was I.

I wish I had said it when I had the chance.
I guess I am digging it out from the soil of my heart now.

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Fits Like a Glove

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It can be a gift or a private kind of distress,
depending on if you’ve found your purpose.
My friend, a physician and farmer, blends
her two passions into a life of caring.

Leaving her surgical gloves in the treatment room,
she dons leather work gloves when she returns
to the farm. This evening the old work gloves
are nestled together on a bench by the back door

as if one couldn’t function without the other.
They hold the form of her hands. The gloves
are dirty, the leather wrinkled, a hole worn
through the tip of the index finger, right hand.

Over years of service, gloves have protected
her hands as she treated deep wounds
in the clinic and in the barn. This gift!
Dare I say, her work fits her like a glove?
~Lois Edstrom “Gift of Work” from A Fragile Light

Nothing much to look at
lying on the shelf, one on
top of the other, an old man
resting his hands on a cane.
Dried-out yellow cowhide,
lines cut deep into the palms
from stones, weeds pulled.
Fingers crumpled, swollen
like grub worms shoveled
up in planting. An extra pair
of hands helping with lawn
work, flower beds, shrubs,
whatever else comes along.
A grief pulled on to bury
the old cat some kid in a
speeding pickup knocked
out of the street like he’d
kick a can. Or kneeling last
fall to unearth the blooming
rose suddenly plucked by
an ice storm, then shaking
rich compost loose from its
twisted fingers still clenched,
holding on for dear life.
~Ron Stottlemyer “Work Gloves”

My farm work gloves tend to look ragged at the end of a year of service. I always depend on being gifted a new pair at Christmas to start afresh. It can take awhile to break them in to the point where they feel like a “second skin.”

These gloves keep me from blistering while forking innumerable loads of smelly manure into wheelbarrows, but also help me unkink frozen hoses, tear away blackberry vines from fencing, pull thistle from the field and heavy hay bales from the haymow.

Over the years, I’ve gone through a few dozen work gloves which have protected my hands as I’ve cleaned and bandaged deep wounds on legs and hooves, pulled on foals during the hard contractions of difficult births, held the head of dying animals as they fall asleep one final time.

Without wearing my protective farm gloves over the years, my hands would be looking very much scarred up like my tired gloves do, full of rips and holes from the thorns and barbs of the world, sustaining scratches, callouses and blisters from the hard work of life.

But they don’t.

Thanks to these gloves, before I retired, I was presentable for my “day” work as a doctor where I would don a different set of gloves many times a day as I tended to my patients’ wounds and worry.

But my work gloves don’t tell my whole story of gratitude.

I’m thankful to a Creator God who doesn’t wear gloves when He goes to work in our world:
-He gathers us up even when we are dirty, smelly, and unworthy.
-He eases us into this life when we are vulnerable and weak,
and carries us gently home as we leave this world, weak and vulnerable.
-He holds us as we bleed from self and other-inflicted wounds.
-He won’t let us go, even when we fight back, or try not to pay attention, or care who He is.

He hangs on to us for dear life.

And this God came to live beside us
with hands just like ours~
tender, beautiful, easy-to-wound hands
that bled
because He didn’t need or want to wear gloves
for what He came to do~

His hands bear evidence of His love…

photo of a plowman teamster’s hand by Joel De Waard
AI image created for this post

contains these lyrics by Kim Andre Arnesen:
Moving like the rise and fall of wings
Hands that shape our calling voice
On the edge of answers
You’ve heard our cry, you’ve known our cry…

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Things to Be Done

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There are many things to be done today
and it’s a lovely day to do them in

Each thing a joy to do
and a joy to have done

I can tell because of the calm I feel
when I think about doing them

I can almost hear them say to me
Thank you for doing us

And when evening comes
I’ll remove my shoes and place them on the floor

And think how good they look
sitting?… standing?… there

Not doing anything
~ Ron Padgett “Inaction of Shoes” from Collected Poems.

Every day after work he’d sit in his armchair
with its antimacassar and its plush burgundy velour
and she’d kneel on the floor to unfasten the laces,
loosen the tongues, and lift out his feet.
When I was ten I stayed for a week
and did it for her. He thought I did it 
for him.
~Andrea Hollander Budy “My Grandmother Taking Off My Grandfather’s Shoes” from When She Named Fire

I did not grow up in a household that took time off.  Time was redeemed by work, and work was noble and honorable and proved we had a right to exist.

Vacation road trips were rare and almost always associated with my father’s work.  When he came home from his desk job in town, he would immediately change into his farm clothes and put in several hours of work outside, summer or winter, rain or shine, light or dark.

My mother did not work in town while we were children, but worked throughout her day inside and outside the house doing what farm wives and mothers need to do: growing, hoeing, harvesting, preserving, washing, cleaning, sewing, and most of all, being there for us.

As kids, we had our share of chores that were simply part of our day as our work was never done on a farm. When we turned ten, we began working for others: babysitting, weeding, barn and house cleaning, berry picking.  I figure I put in over 60 years of gainful employment – there were times I worked four part-time jobs at once because that was what I could put together to keep things together.

I know I’ve missed out on much of life being a “nose to the grindstone” person.

Now retired, I try a different way to redeem my time: to notice, to record, to observe, to appreciate beauty that still exists in the midst of chaos and cataclysm..

Life isn’t all about non-stop labor, yet we get on with our work because work is about showing up when and where we are needed.

And we are always needed, by someone, somewhere, somehow. That’s the reason why we’re here.

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It’s Heavy Work

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From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.
~Kay Ryan “Spiderweb”

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
~Walt Whitman “The Noiseless Patient Spider”

Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

I am stretched, trying to connect between post and branch and leaf and ground.

I leap between them, sometimes not sure where I’ll land or what I’ll leave behind. Connection is hard and heavy work, not knowing what stands firm in a world where wind and rain and storms or some unaware creature can tear things all asunder.

Sometimes what I weave is beautifully delicate and functional.

Sometimes it is blurry, full of holes, and ultimately useless. The center doesn’t always hold. The tethers loosen. The periphery frays and tears. It doesn’t last long.

But it was something I labored with purpose and intent to create.
And that effort makes it all worthwhile.

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The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.
~E.B. White

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The Work of Weaving Dreams

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Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

Not everyone is taking a holiday today on Labor Day.
Some are busier than ever, creating a masterpiece nightly,
then waiting in hope for that labor to be rewarded.

I too spin elaborate dreams at night:
some remembered,
some bare fragments,
some shattered,
some potentially yield a meal.

We work because we are hungry.
We work because someone we love is hungry and needs feeding.

Yet the best work is the work of weaving dreams
~out of thin air and gossamer strands~
where nothing existed before,
not as a trap or lure or lair
but as a work of beauty-
a gift as welcome as a breath of fresh air.

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What’s Left Undone Will Wait

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To rest before the sheaves are bound,
toss the scythes aside, bare the feet and sink
into the nearest haystack, release
the undone task and consent to sleep
while the brightest hour burns an arc
across its stretch of sky:
this is the body’s prayer, mid-day angelus
whispered in mingled breath while the limbs
stretch in thanksgiving and the body turns
toward the beloved.

This is the prayer of trust:
what’s left undone will wait. The unattended
child, the uncut acre, cracked wheel, broken
fence that are occupations of the waking mind
soften into shadow in the semi-darkness
of dream. All shall be well. Little depends on us.
The turning world is held and borne in love.
We give good measure in our toil and, meet and right,
obey the body when it calls us to rest.
~Marilyn Chandler McEntyre “Noon Rest (after Millet: 1890)” from “The Color of Light: Poems on Van Gogh’s Late Paintings”

Van Gogh: Noon Rest at Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Thanks to retirement, I have learned to love mid-day naps.

After forty-plus years of 10 hour work days, then awakened with calls at night, I managed to semi-thrive on minimal sleep.

Not any more.

I’ve discovered that it is possible to leave things undone, something that was never possible during doctoring and patient care. It is okay to set a task aside and think about it later. All this doesn’t come naturally to me but I’m learning.

So it is time to kick off my shoes, pull a quilt up to my chin and close my eyes, just for a little while.

All will be well. The world keeps turning, even when I’m not the one pedaling to keep it going.

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How to Make Christmas Last

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When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
~Howard Thurman “The Work of Christmas”

The day of Christ’s birth is celebrated on one particular day
but the significance of His coming to live among us
remains our reality every day.

It isn’t about glitter and sparkles and stockings and ho-ho-ho.
It is a renewed commitment to the work we’re called to
as His brothers and sisters.

Jesus’ work has no end until He comes again.
In every waking hour, may we share the spirit of Christmas
with our lost, hungry broken world, making peace and making music.

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What Hard Work Yields

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I look for the spade
I used when I was young,
when my grandfather said dig
and I dug holes
the depth I’d been taught
so the posts would stand,
hold the miles of barbed and hog wire
dividing our ground… Dig, he would say,
and all morning, afternoon,
until it rained, until dark,
until I couldn’t lift the spade and grub
and he said enough,
I dug through dry brown
until it turned yellow clay
or black earth caked
to the tip of the steel. He taught me to measure
strength by depth,
narrow the hole around the oiled post,
and sturdy the line he’d laid
before I was old enough
to blister from work,
acquire the knowledge of straight,
of strength, cool soil,
rusted staples and splintered wood,
the knowledge of bending spikes
new, splicing wire,
swinging a hammer down hard,
the ache from hours of digging,
calloused hands and sunburn.
He trained me to rake,
tamp, stomp, pack dirt and clay,
the weight of the earth around the post,
its strength into the line.
Now the hammers, pliers and cutters are gone.
No rolls of wire hang from the beams.
No boxes of staples and spikes jam the shelves.
The tamping stick is broken.
Someone has wrapped duct tape around the spade handle;
the steel has rusted brown and rough;
a crack climbs from the tip to the mud-caked neck.
He would say it is useless,
that things are not like they were…
~Curtis Bauer from “A Fence Line Running Through It”

The old farmers in our county are dying off,
the ones who remember
when horse and human muscle provided the power
instead of diesel engines.
They have climbed down off their tractors
and into their beds
for a good night’s sleep.

Their machine sheds are cleared
in an auction,
their animals trucked away
for butcher,
their fence lines leaning
yet the corner posts,
set solid and sure in the hard ground,
keep standing
when the old farmer no longer does.

These old farmers knew hard work.
knew there were no days off,
no shirking duty,
knew if anyone was going to do
what needed doing
it was them,
no one else.
Things are not like they were
yet the strong posts remain,
ready to hold up another fence line,
showing us few remaining farmers
what hard work yields.

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Ant Trudges While Grasshopper Sings

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‘Ant, look at me!’ a young Grasshopper said,
As nimbly he sprang from his green, summer bed,
‘See how I’m going to skip over your head,
And could o’er a thousand like you!
Ant, by your motion alone, I should judge
That Nature ordained you a slave and a drudge,
For ever and ever to keep on the trudge,
And always find something to do.

‘Oh! there is nothing like having our day,
Taking our pleasure and ease while we may,
Bathing ourselves in the bright, mellow ray
That comes from the warm, golden sun!
While I am up in the light and the air,
You, a sad picture of labor and care!
Still have some hard, heavy burden to bear,
And work that you never get done.

‘I have an exercise healthful, and good,
For timing the nerves and digesting the food—
Graceful gymnastics for stirring the blood
Without the gross purpose of use.
Ant, let me tell you ‘t is not a la mode,
To plod like a pilgrim and carry a load,
Perverting the limbs that for grace were bestowed,
By such a plebeian abuse.

‘While the whole world with provisions is filled,
Who would keep toiling and toiling to build
And lay in a store for himself, till he ‘s killed
With work that another might do?
Come! drop your budget and just give a spring.
Jump on a grass-blade and balance and swing.
Soon you’ll be light as a gnat on the wing,
Gay as a grasshopper, too!’

Ant trudged along while the grasshopper sung,
Minding her business and holding her tongue,
Until she got home her own people among;
But these were her thoughts on the road.
‘What will become of that poor, idle one
When the light sports of the summer are done?
And, where is the covert to which he may run
To find a safe winter abode?

‘Oh! if I only could tell him how sweet
Toil makes my rest and the morsel I eat,
While hope gives a spur to my little black feet,
He’d never pity my lot!
He’d never ask me my burden to drop
To join in his folly—to spring, and to hop;
And thus make the ant and her labor to stop,
When time, I am certain, would not.

‘When the cold frost all the herbage has nipped,
When the bare branches with ice-drops are tipped,
Where will the grasshopper then be, that skipped,
So careless and lightly to-day?
Frozen to-death! ‘a sad picture’ indeed,
Of reckless indulgence and what must succeed,
That all his gymnastics ca ‘nt shelter or feed,
Or quicken his pulse into play.

‘I must prepare for a winter to come.
I shall be glad of a home and a crumb,
When my frail form out of doors would be numb,
And I in the snow-storm should die.
Summer is lovely, but soon will be past.
Summer has plenty not always to last.
Summer’s the time for the ant to make fast
Her stores for a future supply!’
~Hannah Flagg Gould “The Grasshopper and the Ant”

I did not grow up in a household that took time off. We were trudgers.

When my dad came home from his desk job in town, he would immediately change into his farm clothes and put in several hours of work outside, summer or winter, rain or shine, light or dark.

My mother did not work in town while we were children, but worked throughout her day inside and outside the house doing what farm wives and mothers need to do: growing, hoeing, harvesting, preserving, washing, cleaning, sewing, and most of all, being there for us.

As kids, we had our share of chores that were simply part of our day as our work was never done on a farm. When we turned twelve, we began working for others: babysitting, weeding, barn and house cleaning, berry picking.  I have now done over 56 years of gainful employment – at times holding part-time jobs at once because that was what I could put together to keep things together.

An absolutely dedicated trudger.

Now in retirement, my work is about showing up to do what is needed where I am needed. There is a sweetness to trudging that I’ve not known before.

Perhaps it is finding the blend of trudger ant and celebrant grasshopper in the form of the peaceful, gentle and colorful ladybug – doing its job of protecting the garden from harmful intruders.

Truly we should strive to emulate a creature who is welcome wherever it may be found.

Ladybugs are possibly the only non-controversial subject left in the world. You can start a ladybug conversation with a total stranger without getting hit in the mouth.
~Charles Harper

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Please Don’t Take My Sunshine Away

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My father climbs into the silo.
He has come, rung by rung,
up the wooden trail that scales
that tall belly of cement.

It’s winter, twenty below zero,
He can hear the wind overhead.
The silage beneath his boots
is so frozen it has no smell.

My father takes up a pick-ax
and chops away a layer of silage.
He works neatly, counter-clockwise
under a yellow light,

then lifts the chunks with a pitchfork
and throws them down the chute.
They break as they fall
and rattle far below.

His breath comes out in clouds,
his fingers begin to ache, but
he skims off another layer
where the frost is forming

and begins to sing, “You are my
sunshine, my only sunshine.”
~Joyce Sutphen, “Silo Solo” from First Words

Farmers gotta be tough. There is no taking a day off from chores. The critters need to eat and their beds cleaned even during the coldest and hottest days. Farmers rise before the sun and return to the house long after the sun sets. They need a positive outlook to keep going – knowing there is sunshine somewhere even when the skies are gray, their fingers are aching from the cold, and their back hurts.

I come from a long line of farmers on both sides – my mother was the daughter of wheat farmers and my father was the son of subsistence stump farmers who had to supplement their income with outside jobs as a cook and in lumber mills. Both my parents went to college; their parents wanted something better for them than they had. Both my parents had professions but still chose to live on a farm – daily milkings, crops in the garden and fields, raising animals for meat.

My husband’s story is similar, with both parents working on and off the farm. Dan milked cows with his dad and as a before-school job in the mornings.

We still chose to live on a farm to raise our children and commit to the daily work, no matter the weather, on sunlit days and blowing snow days and gray muddy days. And now, when our grandchildren visit, we introduce them to the routine and rhythms of farm life, the good and the bad, the joys and the sorrows, and through it all, we are grateful for the values that follow through the generations of farming people.

And one of our favorite songs to sing to our grandchildren is “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” a song originally written about a horse named “Sunshine.”

For the farmer and the rest of us, it is the Sun that sustains our days and its promise of return that sustains our nights.

You’ll never know, dears, how much we love you.
Please don’t take our sunshine away.

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